by a rush of perception that drained the blood from his cheeks. He stared at a blurred image of slightly tilted Eurasian eyes, short, thick black hair and a fine face with which he was familiar.
“Phone back later,” Aston said into the telephone, and hung up. He stood by Chan’s shoulder, stared at the picture that Chan found so disturbing-and understood nothing.
In his last year of school in the New Territories Chan had participated in some Outward Bound courses, products of the character-building aspect of the English education system. One afternoon the teacher and the group had left Chan all alone in the bush with a compass, a map, a flask of water and some rations. It should have been a simple map-reading orientation exercise, but the compass was jammed. Chan wandered around in the muggy heat, pretty sure of his direction but continually frustrated by the way the paths ran. Dense cloud obscured the sun. By nighttime he was feeling desperate, though he supposed that they would come looking for him eventually. Then with the change in temperature that occurs at night the clouds dispersed and the stars came out. He checked the Big Dipper, the last two stars of which, they had told him, always pointed to the North Star. There it was, the North Star, almost precisely where he’d least expected it to be. Shaking his head, he turned the map through 180 degrees and walked in the opposite direction. He was back at camp in an hour. Detection was sometimes like that.
With Aston watching he took a small knife with retractable blade out of a drawer, cut the photograph of the Eurasian face horizontally just under the eyes and placed the lower half over a copy of the picture of Clare that Moira had brought. He glanced up at Aston, who stared, disbelieving.
“But she’s dead,” Aston pointed out. “It’s her murder we’re investigating.”
Chan looked into his eyes for a moment and then away. It was a hard lesson for the young, who had such rigid views on life, that victim and perpetrator were often interchangeable roles. It was a rare case where one did not, sooner or later, acquire attributes of the other. For the murder victim to turn into possible murderer, though, that did pose problems. And of course there was no proof. What sane cop would bet a blurred photograph against dental records? But Chan knew he was right.
“Check with every cosmetic surgeon with a practice in Hong Kong,” Chan said. “Start with the best, the most expensive, and work down.”
As he spoke, the telephone rang again. “Three million and it’s a deal,” Kan said, after a long snort.
“Two,” Chan said.
“Two and a half.”
“Two.”
“Fuck your mother.” By the submissive voice in which Kan spoke, Chan knew that the deal was concluded.
Fixing himself a late lunch of fried noodles at home, he stood and watched the fax machine roll out a message: “Wow! That was a quick response. Sure do appreciate it; at my age a girl doesn’t like to be kept dangling. Say, do you have any old cop stories I haven’t heard? That’s about the only thing I miss from NYPD, those canteen yarns. I’ll trade you. Jai gin.”
Chan thought for a moment, wrote his reply and watched the machine go to work. If Moira’s daughter was still alive, who was dead? Who knew?
Back at his desk he tapped a Benson out of the box and stared at the blurred Eurasian face in the photograph. He put the cigarette to his mouth and dialed Emily’s number at the same time. He was surprised that the billionairess answered her own telephone.
Chan lit his Benson. “Hi.”
“Who is this?”
“Your scuba buddy.”
He listened to her breathing.
“I’ve been expecting you to call.”
“I know.”
“Come round tonight. I have a dinner engagement that’ll take most of the evening, so make it about eleven- thirty.”
“Shall I bring your present?”
A long pause. “Yes, why not?”
That evening he waited until the police station was reduced to its night skeleton staff. Then he strolled to the tea room and bent down under the sink to retrieve the plastic bag he had found concealed in
43
Opium: Chan knew all about it. The story begins with a field of poppies in the Shan states on the border between Laos, China and Burma. Hmong tribesmen collect the sap first in small wooden bowls, then bundle it in tiny bamboo parcels: raw opium. Chinese traders of the Chiu Chow clan exchange salt, iron bars, silver coins for the harvest that begins each year in February.
As a seventeen-year-old cadet he’d taken part in busts of some of the last opium divans of yesteryear. He remembered small rooms with bunk beds, bamboo pipes with bowls a third of the way up the stem, spirit lamps and the sweet, heavy smell. Emaciated prostitutes combined the vices, selling in one market, buying in the other. Whores aside, the clients were mostly men, often middle-aged. Chan remembered his first corpse. Everyone else in the divan was so stoned they had not noticed the old man die. The old man hadn’t noticed either, to judge from the look of rapture on his face.
Opium was a subtle high that left the American warrior spirit unsatisfied, so when the number of GIs stationed in Vietnam increased to the hundreds of thousands, the Chiu Chow sought ways to improve their product. Encouraged by Ho Chi Minh, who saw the proliferation of the debilitating drug among the Americans as a legitimate war aim, and even by the CIA, which participated in the opium traffic from Laos to help pay for the war, the traders saw a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity. In factories hidden in Hong Kong, Thailand, South Vietnam, Taiwan- anywhere but Communist China during its puritanical phase-raw opium was added to drums of hot water and dissolved with lime fertilizer and ammonia: morphine. Boil the morphine with acetic anhydride for six hours at eight-five degrees Fahrenheit: brown heroin, known as brown sugar or simply Number 3. Asians smoked it or injected it like that and were satisfied, but the West needed a bone-jarring jolt to raise it from its strange despair. Add the Number 3 to alcohol, ether and hydrochloric acid. Sometimes there was an explosion that carried away the triad “cook” and most of his factory, but if performed well, the process produced Number 4 or pure white heroin; the American armed forces had found their high.
A hundred thousand GIs took their habit home, where it multiplied. The Chiu Chow adapted quickly to the huge new market on the other side of the world. With profit margins at over 1,000 percent they hardly bothered to smuggle plain opium anymore, and as a consequence nobody used it.
Well, almost nobody. Emily’s secret package continued to baffle him. A setup? A test? A gift? Why opium?
It was close to midnight by the time Chan’s taxi turned into Emily’s drive. Expecting a servant to open the door, he was surprised that the mistress herself stood in the doorway leaning against the frame. She held the top of a green silk kimono together with one hand.
“You’re late.”
“I know.” Chan held up a cheap black fiberglass briefcase. “I brought your gift back.”
She let him in and closed the door behind him. He watched her lock all three bolts and switch on an alarm at a console by the door. A minute red light started to flash.
“Burglars are a risk, I guess?”
“Kidnappers. You know that.”
She led him through the house to the veranda at the back. On a long marble table she had set out an opium pipe and a spirit lamp. He sat at the table, unlocked the black briefcase, took out the plastic bag with its sticky black contents, which he placed in front of her, locked the briefcase again.
He said: “I thought you were setting me up.”
“I was. I was going to have you busted by an ICAC officer who wants promotion after June; then I changed my mind. Wasn’t that nice of me?”
“Xian told you to get me under control?”
